District Judge Bruno's pay reinstated amidst ticket-fixing probe

Magisterial District Judge Mark A. Bruno won a decision in court to have his judicial pay reinstated while he awaits trial in federal court on charges that he illegally helped fix a traffic ticket in Philadelphia.

The state’s Court of Judicial Discipline on May 24 ruled that the state Supreme Court had not properly looked at the full circumstances surrounding the government’s case against Bruno when it ordered his pay suspended following his indictment in January.

“The conduct with which Judge Bruno is charged does not approximate the conduct of other cases of judicial misconduct in which the defendants’ pay was properly withheld,” the court ruled, “for in no way is it imbued with the gravity and the overt disdain for the law on display in those cases.”

Vincent DiFabio, one of Bruno’s defense attorneys, said Thursday that the judge’s pay would be restored retroactively from the tie the state Supreme Court suspended him in February. DiFabio said he and his client were in the process of going through tens of thousands of pages of discovery provided by the US. Attorney’s Office in the matter in preparation for trial, possibly in November.

Advertisement

Sam Stretton, the West Chester attorney who represented Bruno before the disciplinary court, could not be reached for comment.

The state’s Judicial Conduct Board had petitioned the court in March to have Bruno suspended without pay, after the state SupremeCourt had done so in February. Although DiFabio and Stretton did not argue that he could not be suspended pending the outcome of the case in U.S. District Court against him, they said that the board had failed to properly establish that his pay be halted.

In a 32-page opinion, President Judge Bernard McGinley agreed with that position.

He wrote that it appeared that Bruno had been unfairly grouped in with a number of Philadelphia judges and senior judges who ran a sophisticated and wide ranging ticket fixing operation out of the courthouse in the city. He noted that in its petition to have Bruno’s pay suspended, it accused him of multiple serious felonies, when in actuality he is charged with only three criminal violations.

McGinley also compared the “scant and shaky allegations against Bruno on two isolated occasions” with the charges of “fixing hundreds of cases over a long period of years made against” the other five judges accused, many of whom had since pleaded guilty and are awaiting sentencing.

In an indictment handed down in February, the authorities cited recorded conversations in which Bruno and another former judge, Fortunato N. Perri Sr., allegedly discuss two tickets to be fixed for a defendant identified as “J.M.”

In McGinley’s opinion however, he noted that “J.M.” had ultimately been found guilty of the traffic offenses filed against him, and that when he appealed that decision, a Common Pleas Court judge found him guilty.

Bruno has held office in the borough since 1998, and was re-elected by voters in 2011. He has held a variety of posts on judicial boards and commissioners, and was chosen to fill in for judges in Traffic Court when they were on leave from the bench.

McGinley said that when the conduct board said that Bruno’s pay should be withheld, it should have also looked at hi background on the court, which he said “appears to have been served in an exemplary fashion.”